Speaking to The Guardian in a new interview, Marling spoke about a period when she moved to Los Angeles and dedicated to take a break from music and teach yoga. However, she wasn’t very good at it: “You need to know a lot more than I know to do it well,” she admits.

“I had no identity. It was really, really, really difficult,” she says of that time. “I was socially bankrupt.”

Describing it as a “very null time”, Marling adds: “I didn’t feel like I had a gender in a weird way – I’d lost a lot of weight so I didn’t really have any feminine features.”

Having shaved her hair, she “looked like a young boy. It was quite a good experience of being a non-sexual presence in the world, like a eunuch.”

Marling has said that her new album intends to “address questions of how society views sexuality and gender but without seeking to provide definitive answers.”

“I started out writing ‘Semper Femina’ as if a man was writing about a woman, and then I thought; ‘it’s not a man, it’s me’,” she said of the record. “I don’t need to pretend it’s a man to justify the intimacy, or the way I’m looking and feeling about women. It’s me looking specifically at women and feeling great empathy towards them, and by proxy, towards myself.”

Marling has also shared the self-directed new video for lead single ‘Soothing’. Said to be inspired by vivid dreams she experienced while making the new record in LA in 2015, you can watch the video here.